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Another thing — the ACES-2 ejector seat felt different. Totally impossible, but absolutely true. Kid’s fanny must’ve bent it special.

Doberman noticed the rear end of A-Bomb’s plane had risen a bit high in his windshield; he tilted his nose up a tad more to correct. They were flying a loose trail formation north, climbing to twenty thousand as they ran over the berm marking the border between Saudi Arabia and its aggressive neighbor. A number of tanks were waiting to get their turrets blown off about a hundred miles away.

Luckiest dead man alive, huh? What the hell did Jimbo mean by that?

A quarter inch one way or another.

Yeah, right. A quarter of an inch one way or another and the damn shell would have missed completely.

Doberman snorted into his oxygen mask. He’d been unlucky as hell ever since he got here, and not just at poker.

Another way to look at what had happened to his Hog was the opposite of luck. Hell, nothing hit Dixon’s plane, nothing, and he’d flown through the same shit Doberman had. Now that was luck.

Kid probably sucked what little luck he had right out of him. Some guys were like that. Luck magnets.

A couple of days ago Doberman had blown a tire landing. That was unlucky as hell. Hogs never blew tires. Never.

It wasn’t luck that had kept the plane from becoming a pile of junk that afternoon.

It was kick-ass piloting.

Hey, you want to call that luck? OK. Maybe to a grizzled old sergeant who had been there when Orville and Wilbur traded in their bicycles, it was luck.

To Doberman, it was skill.

And the hell with anyone who said he was conceited about that.

Doberman peered out the side canopy, staring through the thick, protective glass toward the desolate undulations of yellow below. The sand and grit hardly seemed worth fighting over; maybe staring at it all day made you crazy.

Sure, but so did thinking about the oil beneath it. Obviously Saddam’s problem.

“Yo, Doberman, buddy, how’s our six?”

Doberman snapped to attention at A-Bomb’s call. He craned his neck around, making sure his back, or his “six” as in six o’clock on the imaginary clock face of their location, was clean. As he pushed his eyes toward the front windscreen, he realized that A-Bomb had actually made the call to subtly remind him to keep his separation; he was off Devil Three by less than a quarter mile, and closing.

Subtle.

“Nothing behind us but a lot of dirt and open sky, thank you very much, old buddy,” he said.

“Don’t mention it.”

“We’re flying silent com,” barked Mongoose.

Fuck you, said Doberman, without, of course, keying the microphone.

He hadn’t been paying enough attention, and now as he dropped back he realized he was also muscling the stick. So he had to wake up and relax at the same time. Doberman blew a long breath, letting the Hog ease under him like a calm horse out on a Sunday walk. His tendency to over manage the plane was a symptom of fatigue; they’d been flying since nearly three this morning and his butt was dragging lower than the wheels.

Mongoose had volunteered them for this stinking BAI hop, another reason to be pissed off at him. The original frag — the fragment or portion of the air tasking order that pertained to them — had them just sitting on alert at Al Jouf before going home.

Yeah, but could you blame him? Who wanted to hang out while there were things to blow up?

* * *

They were about three minutes from the assigned kill box when a familiar call sign crackled over the radio.

“Cougar to Devil Leader. Devils, stand by for tasking.”

Tasking?

Doberman slipped up the volume on the radio, even though the E-3 controller’s voice had been loud and clear.

“We need you to head east, pronto,” explained the AWACS. “One of our Weasels spotted a shipment of Scuds on the highway.”

CHAPTER 16

AL JOUF FOB
1200

Dixon found himself wearing a rut in the sand at the edge of the runway, unable to tear his eyes away from the stricken planes straggling into the base. Every beat-up F-16, every flamed-out Tornado seemed to criticize him: if its jock could take it, why couldn’t he?

Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. Unwilling to go near anyone whose questions would inevitably lead to more lies, the young pilot collapsed butt first into the sand, covering his face against the gritty wind. His mind blanked; his brain fogging nearly as badly as it had up north.

He’d sat there for nearly fifteen minutes when he felt a tug on his arm.

“Excuse me, you Lieutenant Dixon?”

Dixon looked up and found an Air Force special ops first lieutenant with a greasy pad of legal-sized paper staring up at him.

“Yeah?”

“Two things. The maintenance people say the parts they don’t have are en route; ought to be here in an hour or less. Plane looked worse than it was, or they kicked butt; Jimbo says take your pick. If it’s fixed tonight you can go back to Fahd. If not, we get you a bunk. Check the sheets before you turn in; the pilots are ball busters.”

Dixon shrugged. The prognosis on the parts sounded hopelessly optimistic, given the chaos on the field in front of him, but he wasn’t about to argue with anything that even pretended to be good news.

“Second thing, my colonel wants to know if you can help out the intelligence guys. They’re, uh, kind of overworked.”

“Okay,” said Dixon. “What do I do?”

“Find a Major Bauer,” said the lieutenant, flipping through the pad to see what his next errand was. He’d already mentally crossed Dixon off the list. “Uh, he’ll give you the rundown. Your stuff stowed with your Hog, right?”

Dixon nodded. He rose, surprising the officer with his height. “Where is Bauer?”

“Got me,” said the officer, trotting back toward the tower area.

Dixon asked half a dozen people if they’d seen Bauer without getting a positive response. Finally he flagged down a marine captain with a clipboard who was trotting toward a British plane. Jet engines were roaring all around and he had to practically tackle the officer, shouting directly into his ear.

“I’m looking for Major Bauer.”

“Why?”

“I’m supposed to help debrief pilots.”

“Here you go,” said the captain, handing over the clipboard.

“You’re Bauer?”

“No. But my plane’s ready and I got to get back to my unit. Bauer’s up there. There’s a communications set up in the Humvee. See it?”

He didn’t, but the marine, obviously shanghaied into the job earlier, disappeared before he could ask for more directions.

The clipboard had a thick sheaf of unlined, completely blank paper. There was a pen beneath the clip, which turned out not to work.

While he recognized the type of plane before him — it was a two-place Tornado, one of the most common British types in the Gulf — he wasn’t precisely sure what kind of mission it would typically be tasked.

Had a hell of a drawing on the nose, though. A woman who was primarily boobs was getting a missile right where it counted.

“Like the tart?” the pilot yelled down from the fuselage.

“Excuse me?” Dixon yelled back.

“The drawing. It’s m’wife.” He laughed. “It’s the backseater’s wife, actually.” He laughed again.

Between the roar of incoming jets and the subdued whine of the Tornado, not to mention the pilot’s accent, Dixon caught maybe a third of any given sentence.